Sitting in traffic the other day reminded me of a stock trading company that gets millions of system alerts a day.  Millions!!!  Do they all need attention?  Only some?  How can you know without viewing them all?  There is no way to personally handle such an enormous amount of alerts.  To have someone sit and look through millions of messages a day and determine how critical the alert is or the validity of the alert is just impossible.

Then, a car went by in the Carpool Lane.

It occurred to me, that a business system is much like the carpool lane.  The carpool lane allows vehicles with two or more people to be fast tracked past the traffic.  Like the carpool lane, there need to be parameters that are able to identify which alerts are pertinent and allowed to speed through and which alerts are not.  We’re not suggesting that some messages hop around others and get to us faster.  That is of course, not workable.  But, the system needs to be able to identify and process the alert types that are important enough to require immediate attention.  Sometimes, the alert is as simple as a transient warning and doesn’t require immediate attention.  Other times, the alert is much more important in nature, such as an application failure.

What you need is an application performance monitoring tool with low-latency pattern matching that can scan real-time massive amounts of data for the patterns that predict a trend towards an impending problem translating this event big data into small, meaningful data.  In effect, this is kind of like a carpool lane easing the traffic load.

A tool that would take the worries out of wondering if you are dealing with the non-issue alerts and missing the more critical ones.  No one wants or can afford to deal with millions of alerts in one day or even a week, for that matter.

Click here to watch a video of how Nastel AutoPilot using its built-in Complex Event Processing for APM helps turn event big data into small, meaningful data in real-time and learn more about how to get your business out of the slow lane and be more productive.